In the Future, Everyone Will Be Dead for 15 Minutes

During the last few weeks of 2016, some celebrities died. Every year celebrities die, of course, but for some reason the deaths of the pop singer George Michael, the actress Carrie Fisher, and Fisher’s mother, Debbie Reynolds, was a trifecta too crushing for humanity to bear. Soon, #f—k2016 was trending on Twitter as people expressed their disbelief and sadness at the death of so many beloved famous people, as well as a more general disgust for the year that had just elapsed. A panicky South Carolina man even launched a GoFundMe page to “Help Protect Betty White from 2016,” which raised $2,000 to keep the Grim Reaper from slaying the beloved Golden Girl. (On the advice of Ms. White, who remains alive and well at age 94, he donated the money to charity.)

Why has the reaction to celebrity death become more intense and more personalized in recent years? More often than not, people act as if the loss of a 1980s pop icon or an aging movie star is a personal affront and feel moved to proclaim their grief on social media in ways that previous generations would have found maudlin and embarrassing.

One reason might be the simple fact that there are too many celebrities. Years ago, in The Frenzy of Renown, the historian Leo Braudy noted that the “expansion of the possibility of fame” had transformed an earlier era’s understanding of what qualified as genuine celebrity and thus altered our standards for judging fame. Today, when Kim Kardashian catches a cold, we read about it; when a contestant who lost on Survivor: Gabon ten years ago dies unexpectedly, the tabloids carry the story right next to news of the latest terrorist attack.

It seems that although we know intuitively that death is the great leveler and that no number of sycophants in your entourage or followers on Twitter or plastic surgeons on speed dial can prevent it, we believe that celebrities are immune to it. Our worship of fame has always been in part an envy of the wealth and control that the famous supposedly enjoy. With social media granting us real-time access to the lives of celebrities, and on-demand entertainment services that provide an endless library of actors’ past film and TV shows, our celebrities (even our B- and C-list celebrities) seem always and ever available to us and immune to the ravages of aging. No wonder their deaths take us by surprise.

Never mind that this conceit allows us to avoid some uncomfortable truths about our heroes, such as the fact that many of the celebrities who died “too soon” in 2016 (Prince, David Bowie, Fisher, Michael) had been or were currently serious substance abusers whose drug use might have had something to do with their foreshortened lives.

The meaning and power of celebrity have also changed in recent years, thanks in large part to reality television and social media, which have permanently obliterated the distinction between performance and reality. As Donald Trump’s recent election victory suggests, you’re only faking it if you don’t win. Our new reality is a world where presidents can hire people like Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice reality show whom he thrice fired on TV, as “public liaison leader” in his White House. Omarosa (who, like Cher and Madonna, feels she has earned the right to be known by her first name) is a veteran of more than 20 other reality shows. Surely the West Wing will prove a worthy playing field for such cutthroat skills.

The notion that 2016 was an especially awful year was not limited to counting up the deaths of celebrities and demi-celebrities, however. Various memes—such as the plaintive “Dear 2016: Y U No End Soon?”—were popular online in the waning months of the year. And at the end of December, the New York Times editorial board took to the fainting couch to assess the previous 12 months: “Let’s pretend we’re in some cosmic therapist’s office, in a counseling session with the year 2016,” the Times editorial began. (Oh yes, let’s!) “We are asked to face the year and say something nice about it. Just one or two things. The mind balks. Fingers tighten around the Kleenex as a cascade of horribles wells up in memory: You were a terrible year. We hate you. We’ll be so glad never to see you again. The silence echoes as we grope for a reply.” Evidently at the Times, “fake news” is bad, but self-indulgent pap masquerading as publishable writing is fine.

A few lone voices urged perspective. In an opinion piece in the Times, Charles Nevin noted that as bad as the year was, he was still happier living in 2016 than “fiddling nervously with one’s toga while awaiting the arrival in Rome of the Visigoths (in 410) or the Vandals (in 455).”

But most news outlets endorsed the suffering its readers were enduring and offered advice on how to get through the next 12 months. “Those who feel miserable and afraid have plenty of justification,” the Times’s editors wrote. “For many it was the election of a president unfit for the job. He seems to want to run the country like some authoritarian game-show host, but we don’t really know what he’ll do, and uncertainty worsens the sickening feeling.” (Imagine those words beings written in the wake of Obama’s election in 2008.)

The future isn’t fake news. It’s emotionally manipulative “news” that deliberately blurs the boundary between reality and performance. In the early weeks of the new year, Kim Kardashian, who had sworn off social media for a brief moment after being robbed in Paris, returned to social media with a professionally crafted “home video” meant to quell rumors of trouble in her marriage. The montage featured images of Kim somehow managing to play with her children while wearing stiletto heels, tasteful shots of toddlers gamboling around luxurious yet suspiciously pristine modern houses, and Kim kissing her husband, Kanye West, all while Jeremih’s treacly song “Paradise” plays in the background. The Potemkin Kardashian video is as compelling as it is manipulative. “Welcome to Kardashian Kamelot,” New York magazine wrote.

In his 1984 book, The Minimal Self, historian Christopher Lasch observed an American tendency toward “emotional retreat” in times of crisis. He described a people notable for “our protective irony and emotional disengagement, our reluctance to make long-term emotional commitments, our sense of powerlessness and victimization, our fascination with extreme situations and with the possibility of applying their lessons to everyday life, our perception of large-scale organizations as systems of total control.” Lasch was writing about possible crises such as global thermonuclear war, but today, on the left, Trump’s election is pretty much considered equivalent.

But unlike Lasch’s time three decades ago, the problem today isn’t emotional retreat; it’s emotional excess. The eagerness to compare 2016 to a plague year is more than just a brief moment of collective cultural narcissism. 2017 might be the year The Feelings Economy finally comes into its own, and emotions become the governing force in how we interpret events: On college campuses, undergrads say they feel unsafe when they hear views that don’t mirror their own—so it must be true. People claim that Trump’s victory makes them feel as if their lives are at risk—so it must be true.

In 2017, fake news will not be the problem; emotionally manipulative news will be. A culture that interprets world events as personal traumas will not be prepared to tackle the serious challenges the world faces in the years to come, from economic instability to terrorism. We need less Twitter-moaning and more tough-mindedness, less emotional wallowing and more rational action. And if you absolutely must temporarily quell your anxieties with reality television, at least watch Deadliest Jobs, not Too Fat to Transition.

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If you’re a Republican, the polls must be making you nervous. And I’m not talking about the generic congressional ballot or the president’s job approval rating.

In the Trump era, a majority of voters have told pollsters that the wealthy and corporations have too much power, that the financial industry is under-regulated, and that the economy is rigged against them. More than half of voters favor a $15 national minimum wage, regardless of the displacing effects it will have on low-skilled and entry-level workers. Six out of 10 Americans say “it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage” and about half of all Americans support the creation of a government monopoly on health insurance.

This remarkable consensus is due, primarily, to Democratic unity on policy. Where there is real internal tension and, thus, opportunity for Republicans is less about what the Democratic Party’s coalition should strive to achieve but what it should look like.

“I have a problem, guys, with that phrase, ‘identity politics,’” Senator Kamala Harris told a gathering of progressives at the annual Netroots Nation conference this weekend. “That phrase is used to divide, and it is used to distract. Its purpose is to minimize and marginalize issues that impact all of us. It is used to try and shut us up.” Harris’s attempt to stigmatize attacks on the liberal conception of “identity politics” as a “pejorative” is a savvy preemptive effort to neutralize what may be the left’s biggest weakness: its commitment to racial and demographic hierarchies.

The liberal conundrum was perhaps best illustrated by a collection of protesters who later stormed the Netroots Nation stage. According to the Advocate’s Alex Westwood, the demonstrators attacked the conference for hosting panels dedicated to combating the “white savior” phenomenon. Such panels were considered problematic because they amounted to a demand that minorities volunteer their time to teach white people how to do that which minorities were already doing. Worse, those demands were made “from a position of white comfort.”

Netroots watchers, such as Westwood, would be quick to note that a collection of malcontents disrupts proceedings every year, but it’s of note that this collection is almost always doggedly focused on issues related to race. In 2015, Black Lives Matter activists targeted the self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders for being insufficiently committed to racial justice. Last year, demonstrators shouted down U.S. House Rep. Stacey Evans, a former chair of the state’s Democratic House Caucus, for challenging Stacey Abrams in the gubernatorial primary because she was the first black woman to lead her party in the state’s legislature. “Trust black women,” they shouted.

This contingent may lack raw numerical strength, but it enjoys outsize influence over the political discourse and, thus, the Democratic Party. What’s more, the intra-party dispute threatens to expose deeper fissures within the Democrats’ ascendant progressive wing. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me,’” Sanders argued in 2016. “This is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” This line was opportunistically savaged for being insufficiently “woke” by Hillary Clinton’s communications team, but self-identified democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appears to have internalized Sanders’s admonition.

She leaned into her identity as a Latina woman from the Bronx while savaging those who rely on their accidents of birth to prove progressive bona fides. Her message was lost on Democracy for America spokesman Neil Sroka, who is campaigning on behalf of a progressive Muslim candidate for governor of Michigan recently endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez. “Other than Cynthia Nixon in New York, they are also overwhelmingly young and people of color,” Sroka said of 2018’s class of progressive insurgents, “which also speaks to a rising belief that we need to have leaders of the party who reflect the party, which means more young people, women, and people of color in positions of power.” Nixon, the only exception to the rule Sroka was trying to illustrate, was heralded as the first potential governor of New York who is also openly gay.

Liberals in good standing have warned of the dangers that Democrats face if they dedicate themselves to the kind of divisive identity politics that “breeds its equal and opposite reaction” in the form of a collective racial consciousness among white Americans. Indeed, it will be too tempting for Republicans to avoid following in Donald Trump’s lead and exacerbating racial tensions within the Democratic coalition to siphon off the votes of alienated whites. “We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism,” wrote Columbia University professor Mark Lilla. His recommendation came not just from a place of concern for national comity, but with the best interests of the electoral strength of the Democratic Party in mind.

The progressive left is having none of this. “Apologizing for ‘identity politics’ precipitates an electoral death spiral,” wrote Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Steve Philips, “because it doesn’t work to woo Trump voters, who will always opt for the real racist, and it also depresses the enthusiasm of the very voters we need to win.”

Identity, not economics, is where the fault lines lie within the Democratic coalition. Traditional liberals, even progressives, are not convinced that appeals to racial and demographic solidarity will win back Democratic majorities. The identitarian left is convinced that making overtures toward Donald Trump’s white working-class voters represents a compromise with the unenlightened and racially suspect. And that is where the fight will be; not over Medicare-for-all but over social and racial justice.

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Beginning January 1, 2019, the Trump administration will require hospitals and outpatient clinics to publicly post their prices for surgeries and other medical procedures, according to the Washington Examiner.

Nothing will help rein in ever-rising medical costs more than the kind of price transparency that has been almost wholly absent from American medicine since the coming of medical insurance in the 1930s. Once prices are known and can be compared, competition–capitalism’s secret weapon–will immediately begin to drive prices towards the low end, draining untold billions of dollars in excess charges out of the system. It will also force hospitals to become more efficient and more innovative to stay competitive at the lower price range.

Undoubtedly, insurance companies and large corporations that self-insure will find this information useful. But they already negotiate prices to levels far below the nominal price, just as Medicare does. Those without insurance, who get stuck with the often outrageously high nominal price, will benefit most. With the new transparency, they will be able to compare prices and bargain. “Why are you charging $2X, when the hospital across town will do the same procedure for $1X? Will you match that price?” The Surgery Center of Oklahoma reports that many uninsured patients are already using their prices to get their local hospital to charge less.

(Obviously, this doesn’t apply to emergency care. But that makes up only a small part of total medical costs).

Indeed, Medicare should also be required to post what it actually allows for the various medical procedures it covers (there are over 7,000 in its list), giving non-Medicare patients even more bargaining ammunition. For instance, a recent visit to my back doctor resulted in a charge for $159. Medicare allowed $79.65, slightly over 50 percent, and paid 80 percent of that. My supplemental insurance paid the rest. If the doctor was willing to accept $79.65 as full payment, why was the nominal price $159?

American medicine has a long way to go before its economics are totally out in the open and thus subject, in so far as possible, to market forces. But this is a very big first step.

Chalk up yet another major reform to the Trump administration.

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If the “blue wave” that Democrats see building ahead of November does not arrive with the ferocity they envision, the political left can still take solace in some of the victories they’ve already won. In that event, the Republican Party would have narrowly escaped losing a national referendum, but that doesn’t mean that Republicans have escaped defeat. Even today, the GOP is a broken husk of its former self.

Over the weekend, progressives and liberal populists gathered at the annual Netroots Nation conference to revel in their ascendancy, but their confidence is not unjustified. One after the other, Democratic presidential hopefuls flattered the crowd of activists and, more important, professed their shared policy preferences. A single-payer health care system estimated to cost $32 trillion over a decade, expanded social security, tuition-free college, the forgiveness of student-loan debt, a $15-per-hour national minimum wage, a federal employment guarantee, a dramatic paring back of the nation’s immigration-enforcement agencies; these and more formerly radical ideas are gaining real purchase. Even the centrist Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan swore requisite fealty to the progressive agenda.

Anyone with a sense of modesty and frugality will find this reckless profligacy appalling. Even the immodest possessed of a passing familiarity with unintended consequences must concede, for example, that a massive minimum-wage hike amid a wave of automatization might not be so compassionate after all. But the point of these ideas is not that they are especially feasible—they’re not. The point is just that they deserve to be called ideas. Democrats who dismiss the innumeracy and toxic racial obsession exhibited by their party’s left flank as passionate fringe elements are making a big mistake. The fringe is where the energy is. It’s where the canvassers and the small-dollar donors are. And it’s where the coalition’s ideas are conceived. As such, the fringe doesn’t stay fringe for long.

Republicans know that all too well. At the dawn of this political moment—one that would culminate in the kind of Republican domination of state and federal government unseen in nearly a century—the GOP, too, had its wacky fringe. But the margins weren’t merely sources of embarrassment. They were fonts of enthusiasm and intellectual vitality. The libertarian-tinged conservatives who spent the Obama years organizing, strategizing, and pitching sweeping legislative reforms at CPAC may not have overtaken the GOP, but no one could convincingly argue that they did not have a serious influence on the Republican Party.

Today, that vibrancy is gone. The conservative movement in and out of Congress is not dedicated to the advancement of its ideas but to preventing the other guy’s ideas from coming to fruition.

From the confirmation of judges, whose chief qualification is their opposition to bizarre new readings of the Constitution that justify sweeping liberal policy objectives, to the non-enforcement of onerous regulations by the executive, the stuff that energizes the Republican Party’s activists and intellectuals is utterly unambitious. Gone are the days when conservatives promised to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, devolve federal powers back to the states, scale back the IRS, and render the nation’s ballooning entitlement programs sustainable. Gone is the CPAC that served as an arena of competing ideas. The desire to out-compete the left has been replaced by the fleeting satisfaction of triggering liberals’ gag reflexes on Twitter.

According to Cory Bliss, chief strategist for a PAC dedicated to preserving the GOP’s House majority, the messages that really jazz Republican voters are entirely negative. “If the choice is, ‘Do you want to raise middle-class taxes? Do you want to abolish ICE? Do you want Nancy Pelosi as speaker?’ That’s a debate we’ll win,” he told the New York Times recently. A Republican voter in Ohio’s 12th congressional district summed up the GOP agenda more succinctly: “We’ve got to protect President Trump.” But for what? Republicans asked the public for prohibitive political power and got it, but now that power is dedicated solely to its own preservation.

There’s a lot to be said for running block. William F. Buckley distilled the conservative ethos in National Review’s mission statement as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” and the bulwarks that Republicans have erected in the effort to impede the advance of cultural and economic liberalism are impressive. But there is a concession in all this negative partisanship, and it’s a sad one from the conservative perspective. It is that the legislative phase of this period of unique Republican dominance is over. The ball is not going to advance. The GOP is already on defense.

This strange bunker mentality is entirely unjustified. The appeal of a persecution complex notwithstanding, Republicans are still the masters of their destiny. There are no observable conditions that have forced them into a position of servility. With 92 days to go before the midterms, this docility on the part of the party in power is as inexplicable as it is inexcusable.

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The first of the week’s COMMENTARY podcast explores the controversy around the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, Sarah Jeong, who spent years inveighing against “white people” on Twitter. Will that have any political impact, or is it only a preoccupation of the political class? Also, Donald Trump confesses the Trump tower meeting wasn’t just about adoptions after all…

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Politico contributing editor Bill Scher isn’t the first to claim that the only responsible way for Trump-skeptical conservative to oppose the president is to register as Democrats, but his is one of the most charitable and honest of those appeals. It deserves a comprehensive response. Toward that end, I’d contend that Scher has conservative thought leaders confused with legislators and political organizers. He has mistaken those who adhere to inviolable conservative principle with influence-seekers who are bound to a constituency, not ideas. Finally, he has adopted a narrow view of the current political moment that has blinded him both to what the Democratic Party truly is and the incentives to which conservatives in political exile respond.

Scher began by noting that a few influential Trump critics in the conservative movement have left the Republican Party in the Trump era, and a few are even rooting for a Democratic takeover of one or both chambers of Congress in November. This is, in his estimation, a half-measure unequal to the gravity of the moment and generally not in this group’s interests. There is no country for a homeless pundit. They will need a tribe if they are to be effective and, ultimately, protected.

Outside the tent, Scher claims, the Democratic Party will continue to move left and become even more unappealing to those on the right. The party can serve as a haven for conservative refugees, he insists, if they’d only just throw off their partisan blinders. Ideologically diverse, accommodating, and conciliatory, Scher insists that Democrats maintain the last true big tent. “[I]f you are primarily horrified at how Trump is undermining the existing international political and economic order—hugging Russia, lauding strongmen, sparking protectionist trade wars—then becoming a Democrat is your best option,” he wrote.

This isn’t just a terrible misunderstanding of what animates Trump’s conservative critics; it is a misguided and ultimately deceptive misrepresentation of the modern Democratic Party.

Scher makes the point repeatedly that the Trump-skeptical conservative movement has utterly lost the debate and the GOP with it. In 2016, most of the party’s voters rejected the doctrinal conservatism to which they cling. What else is new? The Republican Party has not always been a conservative party. Conservatives waged a 20-year struggle to displace the progressive ethos that typified the GOP from T.R. to Eisenhower. Preserving the GOP’s ideological predisposition toward conservatism is a constant struggle, but it is one that conservative opinion makers relish.

Trump’s critics in the conservative movement abandoned him not just because of his temperamental defects, but because of his progressive impulses. The president’s skepticism toward free trade, his conciliatory posture toward hostile regimes abroad, his Keynesian instincts, his apathy toward budget deficits, and his general amenability toward heedless populism are traits that traditionally appeal to and are exhibited by Democrats. Why would conservatives join that which they are rebelling against?

Scher’s contention that the Trump-skeptics in conservative ranks would have more influence over the Democratic Party than the GOP is bizarre. The anti-Trump right is far too small a contingent to have any impact on the evolutionary trajectory of the Democratic Party, even if they were to abandon the principles that led them into the wilderness in the first place. They do, however, enjoy influence over American politics wildly disproportionate relative to their numerical strength.

Trump-skeptical conservatives are ubiquitous features on cable news. Their magazines and websites are enjoying a renaissance. They haunt their comrades who have made their peace with Trumpism. Most critically, they represent the strain of conservatism to which the majority of the Republican Party’s congressmen and women are loyal because it was that brand of conservatism that led them into politics in the first place. The worst-kept secret of the Trump era is that this president receives his highest marks when he’s doing conventionally conservative things. When the president behaves as he promised to on the campaign trail, Republicans rebel and often rein in his worst impulses. It’s not much, but it is a sign that a partial restoration of the status quo ante is not unthinkable.

Scher frequently cites exceptions within the Democratic firmament as though they do not illustrate the rule. He claims that the Democratic Party is not “a rotten cauldron of crass identity politics, recreational abortion, and government run amok.” As evidence, he cites the fact that a handful of pro-life Democrats have managed to resist the party’s purge of that formerly-common view, but that is an admission of heterodoxy. The Democratic Party’s fealty to divisive identity politics is hardly a figment of conservative imaginations. From Salon.com to the New York Timesopinion page, many on the left, too, have soured on the party’s attachment to racial and demographic hierarchies. And as for the party’s reputation for profligacy, Democrats can renounce the works of the 111th Congress—the last time the party had total control of Washington—whenever they muster up the gumption.

Scher believes it is inconsistent for conservatives to support a Democratic takeover of one or more legislative chambers and not support the Democratic agenda, but there is nothing inconsistent about it. Conservatives who think the GOP-led Congress has proven an insufficient check on the GOP-led executive are placing a vote of confidence in the Constitution, not the progressive agenda. If the cohort formerly dubbed #NeverTrump conservatives believe Democrats would be a better governing party than the GOP, they should certainly register Democratic at the nearest opportunity. If they believe that, though, they’re not #NeverTrump conservatives at all. They’re just #NeverTrump.

Conservatives are no strangers to being torn between their principle and their influence. Conservative opinion makers have been compelled to choose between proximity to power and their core values before. Those who chose temporary isolation in order to shield conservative beliefs from being disfigured by those who do not cherish them might not enjoy the gratitude they’ve earned. But they left behind a markedly more conservative country than the one they were born into.

The lessons of recent history are clear: Those who are content to sacrifice their principles for access and influence preserve neither in the long run.

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